Is That Legal?

Paul is exhibiting features of conservativism that continue to amuse and horrify me: I call it the "Who Could Have Forseen?" excuse for one's own short-sightedness and failure to imagine.

"Who could have forseen at the time that the Nazis would turn out to be bad people?"

Well, lots of people, Paul. Especially the ones being placed on trains . . .

"Who could have forseen at the time that WMD intelligence garnered from anti-Saddam Iraqi dissidents might not be altogether reliable"?

Well, Paul, any reasonable person who bothered to think it through at the time would have considered the possibility that our sources might have had ulterior motives.

"Who could have forseen at the time that terrorists might hijack aircraft and fly them into skyscrapers?"

Well, the people whose job it is to think about those things and voice their concerns in memos, etc (which they did). That's who, Paul.

And so on . . .

I agree with Paul that hindsight is 20/20. But, on the other hand, foresight isn't legally blind. Not if you take off your blinders.

If Eric or anyone else has a link for the adult Josef Ratzinger's saying that resistance to the Nazis was "useless" or "impossible," especially saying it while he was a professor after the war, would you mind passing it along? I've seen this mentioned here & there, but never with any citation. Merci.

I see that the original firestorm about whether Ratz was lying about compulsory service started in 1941 has been put out by truth. Instead of letting the issue settle and moving on to the next one, the next thing on the blog is to try to breathe life into this nonissue by calling out a poster in the comments section. One poster has a post that messed up when WW2 started and is almost certainly just a little poorly worded with respect to how a child should act in the face of tyranny, and Eric picks that one post to stick on the main page as some sort of evidence of Nazi complacency. Personally, I agree that a child should not be expected to rebel against tyrannical government. Call me a sympathizer, but I find that absurd.

The post was not that good, but this is wayyyy over the top.

I recommend going back to tearing up Michelle Malkin. Now she really is nuts.

And Mein Kampf was such a subtle document...

RWS, you are linking things that I have not linked. I did not quote that poster because I saw it as related to the issue about the Pope. I quoted it because it was outrageous, and because the Holocaust is something I blog about here with some frequency. Perhaps you didn't know that if you don't read here regularly.